


A Spell to Bind All Magicians

by mutagenesis, renaissance



Category: The Magicians (TV), The Magicians - Lev Grossman
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Body Horror, Canon Rewrite, Contains elements from both canons, Gen, M/M, Multi, Slow Burn, Trans Character, Weird Magic, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-14
Updated: 2019-07-14
Packaged: 2020-06-28 05:36:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19805821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mutagenesis/pseuds/mutagenesis, https://archiveofourown.org/users/renaissance/pseuds/renaissance
Summary: For your considerationis scrawled helpfully on the corner of the first page ofThe Magiciansby Christopher Plover. Quentin almost loses the first page; after that, he takes it with him to Brakebills, and he never puts it down.





	A Spell to Bind All Magicians

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first in a three-book adaptation of The Magicians, which draws elements from both the books and the TV show. Some of the scenes near the beginning will be familiar to you, but we'll be off the beaten path soon. We love The Magicians, and in one way or another we've been talking about this rewrite for years. We're excited about this, you should be excited about this too!!
> 
> We're somewhere between the books and the show: for example, we have a character named Janet, but a lot of her characterization is drawn from Margo. We are, however, using the books as our base, so there will be no appearances from show-only characters such as Kady.
> 
> Chapters will be posted as we write them; we aim to post fairly regularly. As this is the first in a series, we'll be here for a while.
> 
> Warnings: discussions of gender dysphoria, depression, and institutionalization. Warnings for specific chapters will be included in the beginning notes.

Quentin’s life had cracked open like the fragile shell of an egg, and the world should have shattered with it. But Brooklyn hadn’t changed; the brick faces of the building remained impassive, the concrete remained a miserable grey. He had grown up on these corners, skinned his bony preteen knees on these curbs, been eroded into his current shape by the canyon winds that flowed between the buildings. Yet these days he could be anywhere in the world and feel the exact same gulf of meaning. 

He didn’t know where he was going now, though he was in familiar territory. It was James and Julia who tugged him along like children dragging a boat on a string behind them. 

“I remember my admission interview like it was yesterday,” James said, for Quentin’s benefit but not to him. “We walked the same way, too. It was in one of those apartments up ahead.” 

Julia scowled and punched James’ shoulder, but behind her pursed lips and drawn-together eyebrows she was laughing. “Your interview was in Manhattan.”

“Oh, so it was,” James replied, picking up the thread of their two person act as if they had never set it down. It was an old shtick they had been happy to perform in front of classrooms and debate halls, or just for Quentin, a miserable audience of one. Even a year apart from each other hadn’t given him room to worm his way between them, to take up residence in the long running joke like he had always wanted to.

But then again that was hardly surprising; Yale and Harvard were closer to each other than either of them were to the sterile Manhattan Psych ward where Quentin had spent arid swaths of the last year. They were two steps and two semesters ahead of him. All three of them had gotten acceptance letters but only two of them had gone. They were pushing into the future and he was calcifying. 

Neither of them would have to lie when asked what they had done over their summers. Julia really was working in the policy office of a major health care provider and James really was carrying coffee for the district attorney. They weren't like Quentin; they were the kind of people fancy jobs just happened to. He was the kind of person who had a mental breakdown the week before graduation. Quentin was the kind of person who would have to lie about his gap year—perhaps he had apprenticed under a master magician—and hope that the sheer repetition of it might make it true. 

Julia spun so she was looking at him, her fishtail braid spinning behind her. Something in it caught the light. Had she always worn it like that? “Don't listen to James, Q,” Julia said brightly, “He's just trying to psych you out.”

“I am not!” James said with a hand over his heart, about as wounded as a badly acted villain in a school play. 

“I'm not worried,” Quentin said; it was easier than saying he could barely remember what James had been saying anyway. “I've already done this before.” 

Not that he could remember his first interview either. The end of high school was a thick mist in which he was still blundering around, unable to escape. Things happened—things always happened—but they immediately disappeared into the haze just like everything else. Sometimes, he would catch a glimpse of some memory, looming, moving through the dark. Sometimes he would see one of them and think, desperately, that he was grateful for the mist. 

It made it hard to make comparisons. Julia gave him an effusive smile before turning back to James; Quentin wondered if she had always smiled at him like that. Was it pity, or just the smile of someone comfortable in her well worn relationships? Had Julia always worn flowers in her hair? Did she always smell like clove cigarettes and wintergreens and the air wafting out an occult shop’s open door? Was this how it has always been or had he missed some trick of hers while they each had been away?

Quentin did tricks too. He could pull coins from thin air and produce cards from well shuffled decks. Each technique had grown from a thousand hours sitting hunched in front of mirrors running his hands through step after step and trying not to catch the eye of his own reflection. He had become good at it, good enough that nobody could see where a vanish became a misdirection became a shuffle. Nobody saw the cracks. 

But Julia had a sort of clarity now, like maybe she knew just how he did it. Or perhaps she had always known and all those wide-eyed smiles she used to give him as he produced her card—a king of hearts—were just the reflection of her pity. She had humored him for far longer and far more thoroughly than all the rest after all. 

James, well, James tolerated him too, but in a brusque sort of way that implied he was rather hoping one day they would both wake up and Quentin would make sense. That he would get a normal girlfriend, like James had Julia, and decide he wanted to be a lawyer too, and that they could bond over the shared indignities of Pre-Law.

“Don’t forget to talk up your interest in extracurriculars,” he said. “Make yourself seem like a real people person.”

He was joking of course, bursting with advice after his year at college, trying his best to make Quentin laugh. But Quentin wasn’t a real person anymore so all he could do was say, “Hah,” under his breath and hope neither of them heard him.

“You have a spotless academic record,” Julia added, almost kindly. “You don’t have anything to worry about. Be yourself and let your passions shine through.”

James snorted. “Just don’t mention Fillory.”

Julia laughed at that, almost unkindly. Quentin stepped over a crack in the pavement—a point of ritual for him—and then, deliberately, stepped on the next one. If he stepped on enough of them, one might open up and swallow him whole. 

“We’ll go out and get coffee afterwards,” Julia said. 

“It’ll be just like old times,” James added. 

They smiled at him with the exact same cheerful smile, like a curved piece of bacon placed on a pancake face; brittle, crispy, meant to reassure an uneasy child that he really belonged here. They held hands with each other and Quentin thought about how those fingers weren’t his and about how even if they were it wouldn’t mean the same thing to Julia or James as it would to him. Together they were young adults, forging their way in the world, holding hands with the serious ease of serious couples. If he held hands with one of them it would still be as a kid, someone who hadn’t left home and still buried his head in fantasy books. 

At last they came to the address of his readmission interview. Quentin pulled his hair out of his eyes so he could look at it, but there wasn’t much to see. There was nothing so unremarkable as a first floor apartment in a converted brownstone, not in Brooklyn at least. It had wrought iron railings and window grates and a heavy oak door.

“Well, old sport, this is where we leave you,” James said. “Don’t fuck it up.”

James thought he was being helpful—he always thought he was being helpful—but it just made Quentin feel sick. He swallowed a weak laugh and the bitter taste of bile, and then headed up the stairs to the building. He didn’t look back to see his oldest friends, side by side without him. 

He stood on the steps of the town house completely unobserved.It was a rare moment after a year in which he’d existed only under benevolent surveillance. But eventually even worried eyes can become a constant weight. He adjusted his binder beneath his shirt, took several deep gulps of fresh air, and gathered his nerves.

It was in this private moment he noticed the door was ajar; when he touched it, it swung back easily beneath his fingers. He knew he shouldn’t go in, but stepping over a forbidden threshold was easier than ringing a buzzer and starting the excruciating process of having his mental fitness examined by a man he had never met. 

Martin Chatwin had done the same thing once. In the second chapter of The World in the Walls by Christopher Plover he had found a door behind the yellow wallpaper of his house. He thought it must be locked, but instead it opened under his fingers as if it was a hibernating animal taking its first deep breath of spring air. Quentin felt in that moment as if he had slipped into Martin’s skin, was looking out from Martin’s eyes, was standing in Martin’s shoes right on the edge of a mystery.

He stepped onto a landing that was just like every other landing in every other subdivided townhouse in Brooklyn. The smell of thick dust almost covered a soft scent, fungal and coppery, that Quentin recognized. It was the scent of certain corners of the hospital, like the hallway near the staff elevator, and the basement door by the carpark, and on bad nights the ER. 

Part of Quentin knew what the smell must mean, but still something drew him onward. He, like Martin Chatwin, was about to go on an adventure. All he had to do was pass another threshold, he was sure of it. He didn’t worry why the second door had been left ajar, even though he should have. He merely pressed forward into the ground floor apartment, searching blindly for a door out of Brooklyn. 

Inside it was just a sitting room but it might as well have been another world. Light filtered in through gauzy curtains that made the outside world only shapes and gave everything the feeling of a Renaissance painting. There was a pot of tea still steaming on a table. In an armchair, an old man—his interviewer—sat, head tipped back, lips a dusty blue. There was not one scrap of life in him. Quentin was looking at a corpse. 

And with this realization, Quentin snapped back to reality. He was not Martin Chatwin. He was in his own painful, panicking body. He was not going to Fillory at all. He put a hand over his mouth and turned to flee out on to the small patch of lawn. He couldn’t handle this. Not another disappointment. Not a another complication in his already labyrinthine path into the adult world. He was going to throw up. 

“James,” he called to the retreating forms of his friends, who were now almost a whole block away, “Julia!” 

Quentin was leaning on a tree, trying to center himself, as his friends returned briskly—but not quickly enough. He felt the bark pressing topologies into the soft flesh of his palm. It was a Callery Pear, he thought, _pyrus calleryana._ He had studied them once as part of a project on invasive species in Brooklyn. It was not native, after all, an unwilling transplant from Vietnam and southern China that nonetheless grew stronger here, in Quentin’s own soil, than he did. Most of its brothers here in American were cultivated Bradford Pears, but this lone specimen still showed signs of being wild. 

If it could break through the soil and take root even where it wasn’t wanted, why couldn’t he? 

“He’s—” James’ voice said, somewhere above him. 

“What’s wrong, Q?” Julia asked. “What happened?”

“He’s dead,” Quentin managed, through thick panic. It didn’t sound right. It didn’t sound like a real sentence. 

He didn’t need to look up from the roots of the tree to know the silent conversation James and Julia were having with only glances. He didn’t need to look away from the patterns in the pear tree’s bark to know that the foot steps on the ground were James’ as he went to verify Quentin’s words. He didn’t need to open his eyes to know the hand on his back was Julia trying to comfort him with out every coming too close. 

After a long moment Quentin heard James’ voice, strained but still sardonic. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “Did you kill him?”

“What? No, I couldn’t...” Quentin felt sick at the thought. An old man was dead. He wanted a normal life, the life of someone who didn't fuck up everything he touched, but his ticket out of Brooklyn was was lying in an arm chair unmoving and unhelpful and dead. How could he, why would Quentin have caused any of that? 

And yet he couldn’t quite shake the feeling that he must have. That this was part of his punishment. Or an extension of his bad luck. Or a physicalized form of his own creeping misery. 

“I’m going to see,” Julia said calmly, and James, who was always the one leaving and never the one left behind, followed her in. They were in there for a few long minutes, then they came out and called 911, and all the while Quentin sat at the base of the tree, all alone, and tried not to throw up or cry. 

Soon the paramedics arrived, thankfully with no police to accompany them. Quentin wouldn’t have been able to deal with police. He was barely able to deal with the paramedics as it was, and, well, he had lived one too many days in the white-walled embrace of a psych ward to ever look a cop in the eye again. 

When the paramedics arrived they pushed their way into the sitting room with a practiced efficiency, motioning Quentin into the building in their wake. They were helpless, of course, in the face of a death that had already occurred, and so they were merely unpacking the moments before and after his death in search of what had killed him. One took his pulse; another pulled back his eyelids and shone a light into the hollow cave of his corpse eyes. 

Quentin could not look. He could not look away. He stood in the apartment doorway like a spare shoe: tossed aside, waiting. Eventually a paramedic made her way over to him. She seemed young for her job and her smile was cheerful enough to make Quentin uneasy given the circumstances. 

“Are you a friend of his?” she asked in a sharp British accent that sounded almost affected. Then she paused, her porcelain smile cracking a bit, and corrected herself: “Were you?” 

“No,” Quentin said. “I’m—I was here for my interview. For, uh, readmission.”

“Alright,” she said. There was nothing in her voice to indicate she cared, nothing to show that she understood his interview was something to be ashamed of. “And he was like this when you found him?”

“Yeah.” Quentin swallowed, and glanced at the body that lay still in the midst of the bustle. “Do you—do you know how he—?”

“Not yet,” the paramedic said, giving him a long surveying look. “Why, are you curious?”

Quentin shook his head and looked around for Julia or James, or anybody he could trust to help him out of conversations that he was only going to fuck up, but nobody was paying attenion. James was buried in his phone, and Julia had drifted to the bookshelf. Just for a second he watched her run her hands along the leather-bound tomes of the dead man’s library, intent and searching. 

He was caught here like a fox in a trap and his friends weren’t there to spring him and all he could do was asked to be let out. “Uh, can I go now?” 

“Sure,” the paramedic said, and Quentin was out the door almost before that one bright syllable had left her throat. He wanted to be free of this place, to be out on the sidewalk, to go get that coffee with James and Julia, to forget that he would never be free of Brooklyn. 

But the paramedic caught him round the wrist. He turned back, wide eyed, terrified, trapped by the noose-knot of her hand. 

“Don’t forget your papers!” she said, voice positively gleaming. She projected at once both immense warmth and intense icy cold, and Quentin could not tell if she was helping him or punishing him when she thrust a thick parchment-colored envelope into his hands. He had no idea where she had gotten it from, but there is was, with his name written on it in a curving script—his real name, not his dead one.

“This is yours,” she said again. And then Julia was there, something tucked under her arm, and she was thanking the paramedic for her work and taking Quentin by the hand. Without having to do anything Quentin was swept out onto the sidewalk, kept afloat by James’ words on one side and Julia’s firm hand the other. 

He’d have to call the admissions office and tell them what happened, if they didn’t find out first. But the sun was creeping towards the horizon and offices were shutting down and it would be hours now till he would be able to form polite words to describe what happened. Everything would have to wait till tomorrow. Until then he’d be stuck in anxious limbo, caught in yet another waiting trap. 


End file.
